July 27, 2014

Auto Share From Instagram To Your Blogger Blog

Blogger blogs don't get a lot of love from the widget, or plug-in community. It's probably rightfully so, considering WordPress is really what most would consider the "world class" open-source blogging platform...and well...Blogger works mostly within Google's gated walls. That noted, I still run a Blogger blog, and I know many of you do as well.

I recently decided to try using Instagram a little bit more. Many of you who do use Instagram (far more than I do) passively integrate your Instagram photos into your blog by embedding a widget in your blog's sidebar, creating a "slideshow" or "filmstrip," but there's no true way within the Instagram social sharing interface to get your pictures to publish as a Blogger blog post. You can share/post them to Facebook, Twitter, Foursquare, Flickr, etc...just not Blogger.

I happened to find a workaround yesterday that I thought I'd share that is run through a service called IFTTT.com. It will share your Instagram pictures directly to your Blogger blog, creating an individual blog post through a simple "recipe." A recipe is simply a command that outlines how when you post something on one app, it will take certain attributes from it, and post them on another app. In this case, it pulls the Instagram photo, caption, and URL and automatically creates a Blogger blog post of it.

You can actually use IFTTT recipes for many other apps as well - for example, you could set one up to save every PayPal payment you make to a single Google Docs spreadsheet...or have your Weather app send your Gmail account an email every time it's supposed to rain.

I've set up Instagram/Blogger recipes that take your Instagram pic and create a Blogger photo post by either using the hashtag #blog in the caption of the photo, or it will embed the Instagram post into your blog by using the hashtag #embed.

You can set up the recipes to automatically blog post all of your Instagram posts without the use of hashtags, but I thought using the hashtags was a little bit more convenient as it would allow you to be more selective in what you choose to post from Instagram to your Blogger blog.

The cool thing is once you get it to run, if you have a service (such as Networked Blogs) that automatically shares your regular blog posts on Twitter or Facebook, you no longer have to share them on those social networks via Instagram (if you don't want to). Just post your Instagram pic with one of the hashtags...it will create a Blogger post...and from there gets sent downstream to the other social networks...with all of the traffic pointing back to your blog.

I tested both yesterday and they seemed to both work okay. I tend to prefer #photo to #embed, only because when it shows up on other social networks later, namely Facebook, their systems can pick up the actual photo to use as a thumbnail image. That doesn't seem to work with an #embed.

If you happen to be interested, you'll simply need to sign up for an IFTTT account either on your desktop, or download the app. (I'd recommend the app). From there you can use one of my pre-made recipes below, or try to create your own. It's not that difficult once you get the hang of it; far, far easier than I probably make it sound above. (One note, you may want to change the blog tag on your versions of the recipes. Mine are set up to tag all of the Blogger posts as "Instagram," which may or may not work for you).

Again, I probably won't use this all the time (if at all), I just thought it might be useful for those of you that are power-Instagram users and also run Blogger blogs. I'm pretty sure you could use IFTTT to auto-publish to Wordpress too, but I'd imagine there's already a plug-in for that.

10 comments:

Sweet! I am a big instagram user, and this is great! There are time's I wanted to share something I posted to instagram with my blog, but forgot, because, I have to do it completely separate. Thank you, for this info!!

I remember 8 track tapes. I knew there would come a day when something tech was too difficult for me to comprehend. I think I understand how this works and why you'd want it - but then, I'm the guy who, at 10 years old, thought if I moved the hands backwards on my clock - that Spiderman would come on the television again. So..... yeah...

UGH, it's not working for me! Does anyone know if it has to be new instagram posts being published for the first time? Because I'm trying to edit or comment on my old posts with #instablog or #blog and it's not posting them to my blog. I'm just hoping I'm not going to have to find all these image files on my desktop and do it one by one that way...

Unfortunately, yes...you need to tag the photo when you post it for it to work. Adding a comment with the hashtag usually won't work unless it's done minutes after you post it. The IFTT service goes out and looks for new posts...it doesn't scan old ones.